In the 2017 movie Wonder, a student named Julian Albans made it a point to make Auggie Pullman—a 10-year-old boy suffering from Treacher Collins Syndrome—feel like an outcast.
Now, seven years later, Julian’s worried the same thing might happen to him.
Oh, Julian looks normal enough. But he’s trying to learn his way around a new, exclusive prep school, Yates Academy, and social pitfalls may be anywhere.
He meets a nice girl who encourages him to join the school’s social justice club. And he just might’ve joined had not another student, Dillon, stopped by. “Word of advice?” Dillon offers. “This is the loser table. You can come and sit with us tomorrow.” The girl looks crestfallen. Julian looks confused. But he can’t sit with social outcasts at a new school, can he?
All this is running through Julian’s mind after school as he heads to his family’s swanky Manhattan apartment. He ignores the friendly doorman and opens the apartment door—expecting to find the place empty.
Instead, he finds his Grandmere puttering about the place. “You weren’t expecting me?” she asks gently as Julian gives her an obligatory peck on the cheek.
It would seem that Grandmere, who’s also a world-famous artist, is in town to be feted by one of the city’s most prestigious art museums. A retrospective of her work, they say. “It’s a polite way of saying I’m old,” she quips. It turns out she’s far more interested in Julian than she is in her own gala. And when Julian tells her about his experience that day and his desire to fit in, Grandmere is not pleased. Not one bit.
She scolds him for not learning anything from Auggie all those years ago. She reminds him of the importance of being kind—no matter the cost.
“What’s wrong with normal?” Julian asks.
“Nothing!” Grandmere snaps. “And everything.”
And with that, she begins to tell him a story—a story from when she was a girl.
Sara is her name. And she was rather “normal” herself back then. Perhaps a little better than normal. She was the daughter of educated parents who gave her everything she could need. She was smart, pretty, talented, always surrounded by a clutch of great friends. She fit in just fine. At least, she always had before.
But she was also a Jew—a Jew living in Nazi-dominated France in 1942. She watched as friends became strangers, as classmates became tormenters, as stores closed their doors when she walked by. Her parents feared that things might get worse. Much worse.
Sara didn’t imagine they could. Not really. Surely everything would be just fine.
Surely.
But when she discovers that, no, things were not going to be fine, she discovers her best—her only—hope to escape the Nazis happens to be a classmate whom Sara always did her best to ignore.
He wasn’t normal. Few people actually knew his name. He walked with a limp, so the kids called him “Crab.” And if they’d had a cafeteria in that rural French school, Crab surely would’ve been at the loser table.
Normal? He was not. But that kid with a limp also harbored an abnormal level of courage and kindness. And Sara, Grandmere, wants to tell Julian all about him.
That kindly boy’s name is also Julien (spelled with an “e”), and the repetition is no accident. “Your father knew how special that name was to me,” Grandmere tells modern-day Julian.
When the Nazis round up all the Jews living in Sara’s small town, most are indeed taken away, including Sara’s parents. But Julien Beaumier manages to smuggle Sara into his family’s barn. For more than a year, she lives there, under the nose of the Nazis.
Julien and his family risk everything to protect Sara; they know full well that if she’s discovered, all of them will likely die. But they do keep Sara hidden—even under the threat of snoopy neighbors and ever-more vigilant Nazi patrols. And later, we discover that the Beaumier family wasn’t the only household taking such risks.
But the Beaumiers do more than just keep Sara safe: They make her, in a way, part of their family. Vivienne, Julien’s mother, gently brushes Sara’s hair at times and serves as a friendly confidant. The family throws Sara a secret birthday party in the barn—drugging a couple of nosy neighbors so they can even play some music.
Still, no one is as conscientious as Julien, who comes to visit Sara almost every night. The two do their homework together, and Julien keeps Sara updated on all the latest schoolyard news. With Sara stuck in the barn day and night—unable even to step outside for fear of discovery—the two begin to go on imaginary trips together. They “travel” everywhere, from New York City to the plains of Africa, all without leaving the barn. And in so doing, Julien helps preserve not just Sara’s security, but her sanity.
Others, we see, are also instrumental in helping Sara in those first harrowing moments when the Nazis show up. Her teacher whisks her out of class just before the Germans arrive, and a couple of other brave men organize an escape for the school’s Jewish students. Without those acts of courage, Julien would never have had a chance to save Sara.
A generous couple gives a woman all the money they seem to have so that she can try to save her son. Some Nazi resistance fighters work in secret in Sara and Julien’s village.
Judaism and antisemitism form the critical thematic pivot point on which this story turns.
But at first, it turns slowly. Sara’s first encounter with anti-Jewish prejudice takes place in a store that she and her family have frequented all of their lives. When Sara walks in to buy something for her mother, the storekeeper looks terrified—then simply gives Sara what she asked for without taking any money. “Just take it and go,” the storekeeper says. And when Sara leaves the store, she sees a sign on the shop window: “No service to Jews,” it reads.
That evening, Sara learns that her mother was fired from her job. They hear that 13,000 Jewish residents of Paris have been rounded up. Puppet shows in the town’s square depict a puppet officer hitting a Jewish puppet on the head. And even though their town is in a theoretically unoccupied zone, that seems less and less likely to guarantee anyone’s safety.
Even at school, Sara begins to experience antisemitism: When a classmate finds Sara’s notebook of drawings—including a drawing she made of him—he looks at it and says, “Your talent is really good … for a Jew.” And he throws the book down in disgust.
Sara’s school appears to have at least a nominally Christian attachment, and the school’s priestly headmaster does what he can to protect Sara and the other Jewish children in his care. (We see the priest cross himself after Nazis shoot someone trying to protect the kids.) A rabbi tells his brave protector, “God will remember your kindness.”
We hear that a nearby ancient forest could be a “dark and scary place,” and the film suggests a certain supernatural aura about it.
We see a service in a synagogue.
Given that Sara and Julien spend so much time together, we might expect that their friendship would develop into something stronger. And indeed it does. Julien had long harbored a crush on Sara, but it takes time for Sara to return his feelings. But when those feelings develop, they’re incredibly strong: Sara admits—at least to herself—that she loves him. The two kiss a bit one special night, and Julien spends time holding her in the hayloft. But their physical relationship seems to go no farther. She draws his portrait and gives it to him.
Before her time in the barn, Sara had a different crush: Vincent, an older boy over whom Sara and her friends giggle and awkwardly eye. That relationship goes nowhere, though Sara does daydream and draw realistic pictures of him in her notebook.
White Bird takes place in one of recent history’s darkest periods. Viewers well know that the Nazis rounded up and exterminated millions of people—especially Jews. The ominous threat of being shipped off to the concentration camps looms throughout the film.
When Nazis come to take Jewish children out of Sara’s school, teachers and school officials do their best to help many kids escape escape. But it proves futile, and the man who had hoped to lead the children to safety is shot in the school courtyard and left to lie. (A teacher actually volunteers to be taken with the children, so they won’t be alone.)
Men plotting to free France from German rule meet in the basement of a theater where Julian works. After the Nazis discover the group one day, Julien finds the apparent resistance leader dead on the basement floor. As Nazi adjuncts throw around movie roll cannisters, Julien and another guy hide in the theater as those Nazis shoot up and vandalize the place.
Julien gets attacked by village guards in the employ of the Nazis; he’s beaten before he finds a clever way to scare them off. (“Do you know what the Nazis do with people like you?” one of his attackers shouts. “They exterminate them, like the Jews!”) Several people are rounded up and put on a German truck. While the Nazis tell the passengers that they’re going to be perfectly fine, it soon becomes obvious that they’ll never even make it to a concentration camp; the Nazis are planning to kill them on route (and they do). Elsewhere, someone is apparently killed by wolves. (Most of the attack takes place off-screen.)
We hear a reference to Auschwitz and how someone died there—one of countless people who did.
One s-word and a smattering of other profanities, including “b–tard,” “crap” and “h—.”
In the present, Grandmere pours herself a glass of wine and offers Julian a glass. “I’m 15!” Julian protests. And while it might be perfectly legal for a 15-year-old to drink wine in Grandmere’s native France, Julian does abstain. We also hear a reference to the prescription antidepressant Prozac.
In 1940s France, Julien’s parents drug their neighbor’s milk with sleeping powder so that they won’t notice Sara’s birthday party.
Julien’s father works in the village’s sewers, and he leads Sara to safety through them. (Sara, as you might imagine, finds the whole thing incredibly smelly and disgusting.) His father’s work sparks some of the ridicule that schoolmates heap on Julien, with many whispering that Julien contracted polio (which caused his limp) because of his dad’s messy occupation.
Julien is relentlessly bullied at school; as mentioned, some call him “Crab.” One boy cru nicknames him the “gimp with the limp.” And certainly, as antisemitism builds up, Sara and other Jewish residents become targets of hateful names and rumors, too.
A schoolmaster lies about the whereabouts of some of his students—but only to save their lives.
Sometimes, we make the mistake of imagining that strength and kindness are near opposites. We make the mistake of thinking that kindness is weak or soft. White Bird tells us otherwise: Kindness comes with risk. Sometimes life-threatening risk.
As a girl, Sara could’ve been kinder to Julien. She would’ve risked just a bit of social capital, that’s all. But she wasn’t initially kind. Truth is, she didn’t even realize it. Julien was just the guy with the limp. She didn’t think about being mean to him; she didn’t think about him at all.
But when the roles were reversed, Julien didn’t hesitate: It didn’t matter that Sara didn’t even know his real name. He saved her—even though the saving could’ve cost him his life.
“We had both seen how much hate people are capable of, and how much courage it took to be kind,” Grandmere tells her grandson decades later. “Because when kindness can cost you your life, it becomes like a miracle.”
And that it does. In Grandmere’s words and story, we hear echoes of the Apostle Paul: “So now faith, hope, and love abide. These three; but the greatest of these is love (1 Corinthians 13:13).”
White Bird may be a difficult watch for some. We see bullying, violence and death, and not everyone we care about survives to see the credits. Language can be raw. And honestly, the movie can be a bit melodramatic and cloying at times.
But that sentimentality is mitigated by some strong, sensitive performances—including those by two well-known actresses (Helen Mirren as Grandmere and Gillian Anderson as Julien’s mom, Vivienne). And the story is a powerful one. While fictional, it mirrors the courage and kindness found in countless people during World War II.
To be kind—to be loving—isn’t always easy. It can cost us, even now. Inviting a homeless person to have a bite to eat with you can be scary. To hang out at the “loser table” is harder than you’d think. But if we don’t do it when the risks are relatively minor, can be sure we do so when the costs are so much greater?
White Bird forces us to ask such questions. And that makes it a worthwhile movie indeed.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
